why I believe

In video games and movies, an easter egg is a message/feature/etc that’s hidden in the main work for geeks to find. Game developers hide their names in the game, things from one franchise mysteriously appear in another, and private jokes hide in the most inaccessible places in the virtual world. There’s at least one easter egg in the Bible.

If there was only one verse like this, it could be merely an interesting coincidence. They’re in poems and prophecies, which make heavy use of rhetoric and symbolism. But at least 17 places in the Bible mention it, so they’re clearly not a coincidence. Here are a few of them:

Have you ever been in a store and felt like stealing something? The food/toy/whatever looks so good, and maybe it really is as good as it looks. You look around, and you don’t see anyone nearby. The door isn’t far away. You know that you could take it and never get caught.

But you (hopefully) don’t. Why? What is this unseen hand that keeps you from taking what you want? It’s your conscience. And its very existence is irrefutable evidence that there is a god, that he is your creator, and that he is holy.

When I was a teenager, I took a world history course. It was very eye-opening. A lot of things that happen today made a lot more sense. I also found out how true the Bible is when it says that the human heart is “desperately wicked“, and “the most deceitful of all things“. This 2000-year-old book explains and predicts human behavior better than many of the most popular philosophies today.

I found that time and again, kings and countries steal land whenever they get the chance. And their people very often applaud the crime. I found that slavery is normal, and racism is normal. Ironically, the people who are deepest in sin are among the most sure that they are in the right.

You never hear a racist say, “I’m evil, so I hate the Jews or the Arabs, or Whites or Blacks”. Instead, they say, “race X is evil, so they deserve all the evil things I want to do to them”. The evil that they see in others is actually the darkness in their own hearts.

How can this be? Are my parents smarter than the many great scientists who believe in evolution? Am I smarter, or do I have some hidden knowledge that they don’t? No. My parents aren’t stupid, but they’re not geniuses either. And the things they know are far from secret – they’re published in the beginning of the best-selling book of all time.

While most scientists believe what their professors taught them about evolution, my parents believe the Bible. The Bible says that God created the universe and life in 6 days, and then it was finished. The Bible also says that all creation is “in bondage to corruption“. It makes no exception for life.

The Bible says that those who willfully refuse to acknowledge and honor the Living God – their maker – will, while “claiming to be wise”, become fools. It even says that at least in some cases, God supernaturally enhances this human tendency, by sending on such people a “strong delusion” as punishment.

Summary:

Evolution is the best explanation that atheists have ever had for life, and it’s probably the best they’ll ever have

I figured out a way to test evolution

Its mechanism mainly causes devolution and eventually extinction

Evolutionary biologists have known about this phenomenon for awhile

Their reason why this isn’t the death of evolution doesn’t hold water

Thus, it’s unreasonable to believe that there is no creator god, and it is reasonable to believe that there is a creator god

The only question left is who this god is, and that’s pretty easy to answer

Here’s my evolution simulator. It’s a web app, but my Github project page doesn’t serve it as a normal web page. To run it, download it as a .zip file, extract it, and open “Muller’s Foundry.html”. It’ll open in your web browser, like a web page, but the URL will be on your local machine, in the form file:///path/to/folder/Muller’s Foundry.html

This series I’ll probably post to occasionally, rather than all in 1 string.

In this series, I’ll list some of the reasons why I believe in the god of the Jews and Christians. The list is by no means exhaustive. The first one I’ll bring up is a prophecy.

“Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when it shall no longer be said, ‘As the LORD lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt,’ but ‘As the LORD lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the north country and out of all the countries where he had driven them.’ For I will bring them back to their own land that I gave to their fathers.”
Jeremiah 16:14-15 (context)

This prophecy is coming true as we speak, despite the best efforts of filthy anti-Semites through the Middle East. In particular, the way in which Israel was established makes it pretty obvious that God made it happen, because without divine intervention, it couldn’t have. Here’s what happened: